The friends of Richard Windsor

In the Wall Street Journal, Fred Barnes makes the case that the Obama presidency is in “an unexpected and sharp state of decline.” Barnes differentiates Obama’s decline from the scandals, though he asserts that the scandals make recovery “next to impossible.”

Carried over from Obama’s first term, The implementation of Obamacare is on the horizon and is a rather big deal. Here is what Barnes says about it:

The exclusion of Republicans from a role in crafting ObamaCare has also backfired. By failing to ensure that the GOP had some influence on the health-care law, the president gave them no reason to support its implementation. With ObamaCare more unpopular than ever, House Republicans voted last month to repeal it. The vote was largely symbolic, but it was telling that two Democrats joined the effort. Short of repeal, Republican elected officials across the country are committed to making the law’s implementation, beginning this year, as difficult as possible.

If the implementation of Obamacare is not somehow staved off, the consequences will travel far with us along our road, to borrow Churchill’s formulation.

The implementation of Obamacare represents the continuing damage that Obama will work through his control of the bureaucracy. The EPA’s major regulatory initiatives by themselves threaten the future well being of the country.

Former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson — she who signed off on the greenhouse gas endangerment findings — is gone, but her legend lives on. You may recall that Jackson’s alter ego Richard Windsor was a prolific author of email messages that Jackson hoped to conceal. Stephen Dinan reports on Windsor’s related accomplishments:

Richard Windsor never existed at the EPA, but the agency awarded the fictional staffer’s email account certificates proving he had mastered all of the agency’s technology training — including declaring him a “scholar of ethical behavior,” according to documents disclosed late last week.

Windsor.Richard@epa.gov was the controversial email alias used by former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, who resigned earlier this year amid questions about whether her agency was complying with open-records laws.

The new records — the latest in a series that EPA critics have pried loose under open-records requests — suggests [sic] Ms. Jackson used the alias even more widely than known, including taking required agency computer training under the fake identity.

If Obama’s ship is sinking, Lisa Jackson gives us hope that we might go down laughing. Even so, Obamacare threatens to give Obama the last laugh.

UPDATE: After writing this, I learn that my daughter Eliana is working the case of Richard Windsor in “EPA honors fake empmloyee.” Eliana’s account adds color and intrigue to this outrageous story.